Page 63 - Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

47 Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

Table 1. Speaking skill progress

Concerning the CoI presences, results in Figure 1 showed higher levels of teaching presence, es-
pecially perceived in ‘Design and organization’ and ‘Facilitation’ positioning it as the most remarka-
ble presence. In the second place, cognitive presence obtained high levels in the ‘Integration and
Resolution’ stages. And finally, the least perceived component of the CoI was the social presence,
especially in the group integration with the lowest level in ‘Cohesive communication’.

Figure 1. Teaching, cognitive and social presences in the online English course.

In the qualitative phase, words like ‘forum, people, talk, interaction, participation, debate, opinion,
environment, reply’, recovered from the participants’ interviews, showed that the social component
was perceived during the course, especially in the forums. Yet, social presence remained as the
less recognized presence. Similarly, through concepts like ‘feedback, facilitation, evaluation, follow
up, encourage, messages, comments, tutor, support, failures, replies, activities, checking, improve,
advice, platform, parameters’, it was possible to observe hints for ‘Design and organization’ in the
teaching presence. These qualitative results are congruent with the quantitative results from the
survey. Finally, regarding the speaking skill, ‘pronunciation’ was the most frequent word in the partici-
pants’ discourse when referring to their improvement; ‘fluency’ was the second and then ‘grammar’.
However, ‘pronunciation’ did not show a significant improvement according to statistical measures.
Observation in the platform showed that participants went through the four stages of the cognitive